Elizabeth Bear


Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky is an American author who works primarily in speculative fiction genres, writing under the name Elizabeth Bear. She won the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the 2008 Hugo Award for Best Short Story for "Tideline", and the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for "Shoggoths in Bloom". She is one of a small number of writers who have gone on to win multiple Hugo Awards for fiction after winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Life and career

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Bear studied English and anthropology at the University of Connecticut but did not graduate. She worked as a technical writer, stable hand, reporter and held various office jobs. She sold a few stories in the 1990s and began writing seriously in 2001.
Bear's first novel, Hammered, was published in January 2005 and was followed by Scardown in July and Worldwired in November of the same year. The trilogy features Canadian Master Warrant Officer Jenny Casey, who is also the main character in the short story "Gone to Flowers". Hammered won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2006.
The Chains That You Refuse, a collection of her short fiction, was published May 2006 by Night Shade Books. Blood and Iron, the first book in the fantasy series entitled The Promethean Age, debuted June 27, 2006. She is also a coauthor of the ongoing Shadow Unit website/pseudo-TV series.
In 2008, she donated her archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.
She is an instructor at the Viable Paradise writer's workshop and has taught at Clarion West Writers Workshop.
The opening quote in Criminal Minds episode "Lauren" was a direct quote of the second and third lines of Bear's book Seven for a Secret: "The secret to lying is to believe with all your heart. That goes for lying to yourself even more than lying to another."
She is one of the regular panelists on podcast SF Squeecast, which won the 2012 and 2013 Hugo Awards for Best Fancast.
Bear married novelist Scott Lynch in October 2016.
In 2021, Bear announced that she had been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer.

Novels

  • Carnival
  • Undertow
  • Bone and Jewel Creatures
  • The Cobbler's Boy
;The Jenny Casey trilogy
  • Hammered
  • Scardown
  • Worldwired
;The Promethean Age
  • Blood and Iron
  • Whiskey and Water
  • The Stratford Man:
  • * Volume I: Ink and Steel
  • * Volume II: Hell and Earth
  • One Eyed Jack
;Jacob's Ladder trilogy
  • Dust
  • Chill
  • Grail
;The Edda of Burdens
  • All the Windwracked Stars
  • By the Mountain Bound
  • The Sea thy Mistress
;The Iskryne series
  • A Companion to Wolves, co-written with Sarah Monette
  • The Tempering of Men, co-written with Sarah Monette
  • An Apprentice to Elves, co-written with Sarah Monette
;New Amsterdam series
  • New Amsterdam
  • Seven for a Secret
  • The White City
  • Ad Eternum
  • Garrett Investigates
;Eternal Sky Trilogy
  • Range of Ghosts
  • Shattered Pillars
  • Steles of the Sky
;The Lotus Kingdoms
  • The Stone in the Skull
  • The Red-Stained Wings
  • The Origin of Storms
;Karen Memory
  • Karen Memory
  • Stone Mad
  • Angel Maker
;White Space
  • Ancestral Night
  • Machine
  • ''The Folded Sky''

    Short fiction

;Collections
  • The Chains That You Refuse
  • Jewels and Stones
  • Shoggoths in Bloom
  • The Best of Elizabeth Bear
;Short stories
  • Love-In-Idleness
  • The Company of Four
  • Speak!
  • Tiger! Tiger!
  • Ice
  • The Chains That You Refuse
  • This Tragic Glass
  • Old Leatherwings
  • Seven Dragons Mountains
  • Sleeping Dogs Lie
  • When You Visit the Magoebaskloof Hotel, Be Certain Not to Miss the Samango Monkeys
  • Los Empujadores Furiosos
  • The House of the Rising Sun
  • Wax
  • Two Dreams on Trains
  • Follow Me Light & Year's Best Fantasy and Horror
  • Botticelli
  • And the Deep Blue Sea
  • Long Cold Day
  • The Inevitable Heat Death of the Universe
  • One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King
  • Gone to Flowers
  • High Iron
  • Wane
  • Love Among the Talus
  • L'Esprit d'Escalier: Not a Play in One Act
  • Lucifugous
  • Schrödinger's Cat Chases the Super String
  • The Ile of Dogges
  • The Cold Blacksmith
  • Sounding
  • The Devil You Don't
  • Stella Nova
  • Limerent
  • Orm the Beautiful
  • The Something-Dreaming Game
  • War Stories
  • Cryptic Coloration
  • Tideline
  • Black Is the Color
  • The Rest of Your Life in a Day
  • Inelastic Collisions
  • The Ladies
  • Abjure the Realm
  • Annie Webber
  • Boojum
  • Hobnoblin Blues
  • Shoggoths in Bloom
  • Your Collar
  • Sonny Liston Takes the Fall
  • The Red in the Sky Is Our Blood
  • The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder
  • Snow Dragons
  • Mongoose
  • Formidable Terrain
  • Cuckoo
  • Swell
  • The Horrid Glory of Its Wings
  • Dolly
  • The Romance
  • Gods of the Forge
  • The Leavings of the Wolf
  • King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree
  • Needles
  • The Salt Sea and the Sky
  • ad eternum
  • The Slaughtered Lamb
  • Faster Gun
  • Form and Void
  • The Wreck of the "Charles Dexter Ward
  • The Death of Terrestrial Radio
  • The Deeps of the Sky
  • No Decent Patrimony
  • The Governess
  • Book of Iron Novella
  • The Hand is Quicker
  • No Place to Dream, but a Place to Die
  • You've Never Seen Everything
  • Madam Damnable's Sewing Circle
  • Covenant
  • In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns
  • This Chance Planet
  • Terrior
  • The Bone War
  • The Heart's Filthy Lesson
  • In Libres
  • Margin of Survival
  • And the Balance in Blood
  • Skin in the Game
  • What Someone Else Does Not Want Printed
  • Perfect Gun
  • The King's Evil
  • No Work of Mine
  • She Still Loves the Dragon
  • Okay, Glory
  • We Have Always Died in the Castle
  • Bug's A-Life
  • Particulates
  • Deriving Life
  • Lest We Forget
  • No Moon and Flat Calm
  • Bullet Point
  • Soft Edges
  • Erase, Erase, Erase
  • A Time to Reap
  • Hacksilver
  • On Safari in R'lyeh and Carcosa with Gun and Camera
  • A Blessing of Unicorns
  • The Red Mother
  • The Part You Throw Away
  • Twin Strangers
  • ''Here Instead of There''

    Poetry

  • "Li Bai Drowns While Embracing the Moon" in Not One of Us, Issue 42.
  • "Seven Steeds" in Lone Star Stories, Issue 29, Oct. 2008.
  • "e.e. 'doc' cummings" in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2003.
  • Hel on a Headland in ''Uncanny Magazine''

    Essays

  • "We'll Make Great Pets" in ''Chicks Dig Time Lords''

    Reception

of io9 wrote that Bear "is famous for combining high-octane military/spy tales with eccentric and subversive subplots".

Awards